Germination 16

August 27th, 2032.

I was swaddled by warmth and inhuman strength, shivering as fragments of memory and pain surge into the forefront of my mind.

It hurts, it hurts.

I whimpered, cuddling into the warmth, gripping soft fur, and comforted by the deep drum of a vast heartbeat. A deep chuff was blown in my face, and my nose picked up the scent of Green.

My eyes snapped open, and I found myself staring into… a furry chest rippling with muscle as dense as steel.

What?

“Was going on?” I slurred my words, exhaustion quietly oppressing me with its weight. A snout poked against my temple, and I blanched as a wet, warm tongue licked me upside the face. “What? Why?!” I leaned away from the attacker and my brain finally caught up with the situation. And saw what was carrying me.

A massive bipedal wolf, a werewolf of all beings, holding me in their arms. It didn’t take me long to realize who the honey-gold wolf was, those distinctive eyes of hers were enough.

I swallowed, she was beautiful. She was a glorious specimen of a wolf, with a powerful frame rising nine feet in the air. But it was far more than that as my eyes saw more than humanly possible. She was the wild Green personified, the laws of nature, life and growing and solidity, resilience. Claws and fangs swam with pearlescent cyan, with flecks of black and silver pulsating with unholy life.

I blinked and saw the warped lifeblood under her skin, the lunatic chaos of the Blue, delusion and adaptability circling tradition and perseverance. Golden-brown fur flared with power, khi reaching down to the earth and up to the moon up above. She growled, revealing gleaming fangs like moonlight, eyes glowing like fire, like the glory of the sun.

Althea was a flawless chimera of unearthly colors not quite contained by her body. Wolf and witch seamlessly merged by magic and soul.

“My god,” I barely dare to breathe. “You’re beautiful.”

Althea laughed, a deep rumbling sound down to my bones. I definitely blushed in reaction when I realized I said that aloud.

Dinah snorted. “I see you’re back to your usual self.”

I blinked. “Umm. Can I be put down now?”

Althea growled but didn’t disobey my plea, and I felt less dazzled as my feet touched the bare ground of… what?

It looked like a warped copy of my town, rusted, ancient and broken in every respect. The sky was a sickly yellow scattered against pale blue, like it had been tainted with pollution, with rot, with death. The buildings themselves were like metal crossed with rotting flesh, layered with strange rents and cracks in reality.

The dying gasp of the Hub of the Wheel…

I gulped. “We’re on Earth aren’t we?” In the alternate layer of reality that was busy self destructing? “She’s… here isn’t she?”

Althea nodded with a raging growl, extending claws that would give a tiger a run for their money.

“We followed the trail, but…” Ajani trailed off with a wince, looking at me with real concern.

“I know.” I said with a false grin, shivering and ignoring the faint memory of my own screams. “But that thing… Cassiopeia is a monster. She’s not going to stop until we’re all dead, until she’s devoured our very lives.” I wanted to break down and scream, I wanted to run.

I mustn’t run away.

Dinah nodded. “We have our prey, and you’re the one who can track it down.”

I gave a sharp flash of teeth. “The Law of Reciprocity, that which acts can be acted upon.” She had targeted me with her magic, reached into my soul to rip into it, to peer at secrets that weren’t hers to take.

“What do you need?” Dinah asked, gliding over to my left side. I could feel her aura rush over my person, and it calmed the painful chills in my soul.

“Support. Anything you can offer.” I said honestly, still feeling drained from having my mind invaded. Althea nuzzled me, and licked the side of my face.

Oh… that helps somehow.

The four witches moved, placing me at the center of the lineup, like I was the keystone in an arch. I watched four auras warp and twist in their own unique patterns and frequencies. Dinah was like the sun, filaments of plasma gently wrapping around me. Althea was like the moon, with beams of light like the branches of a tree, lifting me up. Energy and Foundation.

Hakim was like the heat of the forge and the blasting wind of the desert, ephemeral aura hammering against my soul. Forge and Crucible. Ajani was the least familiar and most reluctant, his aura a shameful white light, like bottled potential, like a hedgehog too afraid to drop his spines.

I held out my ephemeral hands, clinging to that soothing light, warding me from danger. Protection and Thorns.

“Thank you…” I murmured as I let myself fall into the tranquility of the space between spaces, into a pristine realm, reaching not for the external but the internal.

Everywhere I looked, I saw a web of connections and consciousness. Strands of the energies which connected all living things, just as Cassiopeia was alive. I could feel myself too, where she had poked and prodded and clawed at my sense of identity.

It was a point of connection that was unique, only possible because she had delved into my brain. I could pluck the strand… and follow it back to its origin. But that wasn’t what I was going to do.

I was pissed.

That monster had rifled through my mind, and forced me to relive the worst days of my life.

Payback was fair play.

Without hesitation I began to pull from the sea of the void, twisting and warping it into shape. She had taken from me… so I would take from her. It was an intuition, a furious outrage which guided the shape of my spell.

I saw images as I raced down the connection, flashes of insight and forbidden knowledge. Living stars and darkness, and flashes of a battle in another world, a mind screaming for release.

Help.

I dragged, pulled, reached. For outrage and hate and hostility in the serenity of the void. I launched the void like a spear into the connection, and pulled it back.

A massive thinnie was ripped open, and all ten thousand tons of threaded queen fell from a hundred stories up, limbs snapping like twigs on impact. I could see the hands and limbs inside it combust, violet-silver fire warping space and time in lethal eddies.

The Other was forced out of the dying queen, and thousands of stars were crashed back together in a violent shockwave.

The Vessel, it is MINE. I will not be denied!

The entire entity was burning, forced to abandon her vessel as I bounced back all the misery and pain she had inflicted on me. But she wasn’t dead, merely crippled as she slid back together in a tide of starry night. Screaming in agony as Void ate away at her flesh and spirit.

And then… I heard the incoming roar, of a sickly yellow sky growing sicker and more wicked.

“Maelstrom.” I said aloud, blood draining from my face. “MAELSTROM!”

My friends all went pale or like Althea whimpered.

I turned… and saw a wall of madness rush towards us, in a vortex of broken physics and logic. A lethal blowout of spiritual matter.

We started to run, but we didn’t know where to hide. Fuck, fuck! After all this?

A limb reached out to catch, and before I knew it, I was thrown through an open iron door. My friends followed, and I crushed under their weight.

The door shut, right as the great storm hit.

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The building shook with the roar of a dying world, and I curled into Althea’s warm fluffy side.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“Woo, we got here right on time.” A voice I knew well was barely heard over the clamor of a thousand thousand things being rendered down by the Maelstrom.

“Mags?!” I called out to the vampire who looked like she had seen better days.

Her hair was a bloody mess, and she was covered in injuries, cuts, bruises, lacerations and more. Her entire form seemed unsteady as a whole. I could see the seams where her Shadow peaked out.

“Hey.” She waved lazily, winking at me with a flirty exhaustion. “I see you’re cuddling up your fluffy girlfriend. Nice.”

“She’s not—” I cut myself off, pinching my nose to relieve a growing headache. “Nevermind, how did you get here? I know you can travel through shadows and dark spaces, the spirit world is a different story.”

Mags grinned. “I had some help for that.” Two more people stepped in from the shadows, and I blinked at the sight of Ultima and… the green cloaked sniper from what felt like weeks ago.

I blinked as my eyes focused on her aura, did I know this person?

The green cloaked woman was covered in a fractal pattern, obscuring any deeper look into her essence. Like an infinitely splitting tree, far too much for my mind to fathom.

“The green lady was helping me take down a big cluster of threaded ones with her big guns. Then found a rift and found Ultima right after, she followed that giant walking corpse across worlds.”

“How many did we lose?” Dinah asked my teacher with a twitch of pleading.

“About a hundred casualties, and twenty dead on our side. Whatever Celia did saved a lot of lives.” There was pride there that made me blush.

“I… just targeted it through the connection the Other made to…” my breath hitched, phantom pain aching in my skull. “I think that thing can be countered with void, light or darkness. Void and light are like against like, dark is the opposite. Hostile bane.”

Mags licked her bloodied lips. “Is it dead?”

I reached for the web of connections, plucking at one strand. I clicked my tongue. “No. But Cassiopeia has been crippled both by the bounce and being unable to avoid the Maelstrom. But she can recover if we let her.”

The building shook again as the storm continued to wash over the spiritual counterpart of home. But it wouldn’t be more than a few minutes before the storm sputtered away into nothing.

Dinah turned over to the green cloaked woman, and bowed her head. “Thank you for your assistance in guarding my people… and Celia.” She winced at my glance and I shrugged.

The sniper snorted but said nothing, aside from nodding. Dinah didn’t add another word, simply smiling. An odd thing when her teeth could rip out someone’s throat.

I kept my mind focused on the noise of the storm, not wanting to break down. This wasn’t the best place for it unless I wanted to die.

I took a breath and threw myself off of Althea, who followed after me with a whine. I grinned stupidly at her lupine face, and placed my hand against her chin.

“I see you finally figured out how to Shift, I’m glad.” I really was happy for her, I knew her being incomplete ate at her. “You make a very gorgeous wolf, and you’re a large specimen too hmm?”

I had seen her family wolf out once or twice, the average was around seven to eight feet. She was even larger, and I could feel her muscle strain like corrugated steel. She could probably lift twenty tons without breaking a sweat, and I couldn’t imagine her strength when reinforcing her body.

And she was still a growing wolf, most werewolves continued to grow into their 20s, even if diminished from early puberty. Her fangs were also enormous, easily three inches long, and her eyes burned like pale gold.

I chuckled breathlessly and rolled my tense shoulders, as I glanced out the window which danced with colors that didn’t exist on the spectrum. The death kneels of a world crying out for help.

A finger brushed the void and space-time growled. Oh fuck.

“Maelstrom is done! We gotta move!” I warned as I felt the encroaching awareness of something vast aching to devour us whole.

Ultima twisted her staff, pulling at the fabric with Althea easing our passage with her spirits.

We shifted out of the house right in time for it to be torn to utter pieces, the spirit world bending around us to shield us from the backlash.

I turned around and damned near shat myself. “What. The. Fuck.”

“YOU.” The true body of Cassiopeia revealed herself, turning towards us with violent intent. Her body looked human from the most distant and distorted possible lens of perspective. Two legs, a torso, two arms, a head.

But nothing more.

It was a body of energy moving like fluid, made of shapes and abstract patterns, floating apart and linked together with tendrils of light. The torso was narrow, twisting threads like a double helix paired with floating arms made of orbs and rods of white-blue light. The legs were shapely stellar nebulas, smokey and ephemeral. The head was narrow, like a shovel, and broad like a shovel. It had six eyes, reflecting pure blue. The bright blue and white light was contrasted by the outline of stellar night.

There were broken chains falling off the the entity like rain, some painfully stabbed into the corpse of the threaded one.

“Fuck.” I cursed.

“Oh.” The voice of Cassiopeia had become more silken, inspecting fingers made of threaded starlight. “I appear to be dying.” I saw the stars that made her body winking out one by one.

Shit…

“I believe I will show you all the pleasure of dying with me!”

Her body swelled, stars screeching and dying under her skin, and I had only milliseconds to say maybe I made a mistake—

Then a drone of sound and a blast of force swept us off of our feet, and flying into a nearby building.

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“Disgusting, insolent insects!” The great abstract Other screamed like a banshee as she tore through the spiritual landscape of Puerta Springs.

“Does she never shut up?” I growled, summoning up darkness using my bracelets. It countered her light to some extent.

“Can you even fathom being chained for a galactic cycle mortal!” She puffed up, and we all jumped or flew or rode on someone who could do either. “To watch the stars age and die and see disgusting creatures rise from their corpses?! To have to ride that flesh to escape my bondage, to escape the tug of my chains being held by another!”

“Another…?” I muttered aloud, riding on air and negating mass to move as quickly as possible.

I spun my hands, gathering surrounding heat to ignite into flame, and drew from the Deep. I drew from the internal, seeing the infinite complexity which made up the Other. The flames I held changed, seeming to draw in energy and I wondered.

I laid out my hands, gathering the flow of the Deep and the Spark, and with a mental push, blasted a massive beam of strange fire.

It struck the Other head on, and with a mental adjustment… I started to pull heat and energy from the storm of magic around her.

“YOU DARE!” Cassiopeia was pissed as I attacked her, modeling my new spell after what Ultima was capable of. I fed her light into the Dark, where it would fall away forever. “I am greater than you human, I am—”

She was cut off by what looked like dozens of tons of explosions being set off at once, blowing apart entire layers of her corpus.

“You talk too much.” The green cloaked woman commented with a chilling confidence, lifting her monster of a gun. More like an anti-tank rifle, which she fired with a careful stance.

Cassiopeia rose from the explosion as I continued with the spell, like a river going downstream. I felt a sudden pulse of support, as Ultima unleashed the same spell, a more complex and dense weave of magic negation.

The god-thing leaped forward a hundred feet, raking down with her claws… only to get fully body tackled by Althea, sending the five story monstrosity tumbling down.

Ajani was running around the place with Hakim in tow, and before I knew it, the Other was encircled in the shadows. Which pissed her off even more, lunging at the pair before exploding as she was met with her opposite.

She fired off a beam, and the circle shattered but not before ripping off her left arm. Ajani tossed his sword in a strange arc which cut a tendon, toppling the giant as the leg was binded incorrectly. Three massive bullets blasted into the light being, shattering flesh and corpus in equal measure.

It still wasn’t enough, she was reduced from whatever she had once been but she was more powerful than all of us combined. Luna was here, casting down necrotic flames, while Dinah fired massive bolts of lightning and fire, and explosions.

And then a threaded one fell onto her face, digging into her eyes. The pulse of power from the entity was aborted as she was latched onto by more threaded ones. The first of hundreds more, streaming out of cracks in the world in droves. Ranks upon ranks, falling upon the god-creature with revenge on mind.

A massive limb slammed into the Other, as the supposed corpse she had puppeted slammed into her with the force of a falling city. They tore through the flesh of their slave master, even as they died inch by inch.

Another limb whipped out, and I was grabbed without a second though along with Dinah. I was pulled closer to the onslaught, forced to release my spell.

“What—”

“Hush.” A hundred threaded ones vibrated. “The Thread is gone, I am the last who will know the songs and ways of my People. You seek to slay our killer, use the Dark Blade. Slay the Sun.”

Dinah blinked and pulled out a blade. “Ultima had it.”

“Give it here please?” I asked nicely and was handed the tool, and shuddered at the killing intent infused into the weapon. “One time use I think, this thing is old.”

Ontological Murder given Form.

“I can get you close.” Dinah offered and the tendrils of the Queen handed her to me.

We were flicked like bugs, given no time to react. Dinah twisted in midair, wings folded back until we became a living missile. I held the handle of the blade, and extended my arm downwards, feeding it with a touch of the Black.

The dark blade cut along starry flesh, and the Black within it… spread like an explosion through the body of the god. It turned to dust in my hands, and with final fanfare…

“No…no… NO!”

Cassiopeia burst into motes of white that filled the sky, turning night into day.

We crashed into Althea, who slowed our fall as we landed into another building. Dust was scattered everywhere, my entire head dazed in utter confusion and disbelief.

It was over.

“Celia!” I was barely conscious when I heard Ultima, my darkening vision homing in on silver eyes.

I coughed. “Oww.”